Choose a collection of statistical paths through that are differentiable in quadratic mean. A statistical tangent set at is the set of their score functions. In particular each member belongs to , by the mean-zero score identity under quadratic-mean differentiability.
A statistical tangent set records which first-order directions the chosen statistical paths can realize. Its closed linear span in L2 space is the statistical tangent space. The tangent set consists of attainable scores; the tangent space also includes their linear combinations and limits.
Let be a bounded function with . A bounded density tilt realizes this direction:
These are nonnegative probability density functions, since . The uniform Taylor expansion of the square root gives
The squared L2 norm of this remainder is , since is bounded. Thus the statistical path is differentiable in quadratic mean with score function .
Conversely every score function is centered by the mean-zero score identity under quadratic-mean differentiability. Choosing all these bounded density tilts therefore gives the statistical tangent set
This is a valid choice of statistical tangent set; it does not assert that every possible score function in the unrestricted density model is bounded.
Consider any differentiable-in-quadratic-mean path with score function . Put , where . The quadratic-mean to L1 density derivative follows from
By the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality,
Since is a bounded function, multiplying this L1 norm bound by proves
The last equality uses . The derivative is a bounded linear functional of , so the required pathwise differentiability of a statistical functional holds, in particular relative to the statistical tangent set from part (b). Its derivative is
For the explicit bounded density tilts in part (b), this derivative is also obtained by direct integration, with no remainder term.
Vary only the probability density function of , using with bounded and . The nuisance score function is , giving the statistical tangent set
Its closed linear span is the nuisance tangent space of all centered functions of , by density of bounded centered scores.
The conditional expectation of the parametric score function given is zero:
It is therefore orthogonal to this nuisance tangent space. Its orthogonal projection onto that space vanishes, so the efficient score is unchanged. By independence and ,
These equal the parametric score function and Fisher information when is known. There is no loss of information from the unknown covariate density. This is adaptivity to an unknown covariate distribution; it follows from score orthogonality, without having to estimate the nuisance parameter.
Statistical tangent space 2026-10-07
The statistical tangent space is the closed linear span in L2 space of a statistical tangent set. Taking this closure makes orthogonal projection available and ensures that a continuous derivative specified on attainable score functions extends to the whole space.